


Lies your psychiatrist told me

by a_pocket_full_of_fancy_words



Series: Lipstick [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Ableism, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Loss, Loss of Identity, Memory Loss, Misgendering, Nonbinary Character, Other, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychiatric Abuse, Psychologists & Psychiatrists, Queer Gen, Trans Character, Transphobia, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-03
Updated: 2014-10-08
Packaged: 2018-02-03 07:15:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1735835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_pocket_full_of_fancy_words/pseuds/a_pocket_full_of_fancy_words
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Having spent decades as the Winter Soldier with no identity at all, Bucky's psychiatrist convinces Steve not to complicate things further by revealing that Bucky was trans before the fall.<br/>After all, it wouldn't be fair to compromise the image Bucky has of James Barnes.<br/>It's for the best, really, and if Steve somehow thinks that opening up the wound is going to bring his Bucky back? Well, he's kidding himself.</p><p>Sequel to Things that haven't changed</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Raspberries

**Author's Note:**

> I would like to thank friends, my family, and most of all my five worst therapists, without whom I might have had too good an experience of being trans to have been inspired to write this fic.
> 
> This fic is the SEQUEL to "Things that haven't changed" and it will definitely help you to have read that first.
> 
> Warnings: Transphobia, misgendering, Steve being generally traumatised by everything, shitty shrinks of the all too common variety, and the pathologisation of trans people. (All your favourite shitty psych stuff)
> 
> Bucky in non-binary and in some ways quite femme in this fic but it's not massively well understood by Steve or their psychiatrist; Bucky and Steve's relationship is exactly whatever you want it to be so long as that relationship permits essentially platonic kisses. 
> 
> I have tried not to pronoun Bucky in this, although I might either fuck up or have to use they if a sentence is being particularly unworkable.

Steve doesn't really understand what's happening when it does, but he trusts that the doctors and therapists put in place are genuinely looking out for Bucky, at least at first.

Dr Lysse Grant is not Steve's psychiatrist, nor is she his psychologist. She is both, for Bucky, and as of four days ago, Steve is Bucky's legal conservator for a further 26 days. She is supposed to be equipping him to deal with Bucky's moods and needs and making sure he's up to the job.

“The nightmares, I'm afraid, are to be expected, and it's no real surprise he doesn't want help with them given what “going to sleep” has entailed these past few decades. What's important is that we reinforce James' sense of identity,” She says, shuffling her handwritten notes, manilla paper crinkling in a way that should be calming but instead seems urgent. “Make sure he has access to all of his medals, uniform, that sort of thing.”

Steve's mind lags behind the conversation, caught on the idea that _James_ might be an identity at all. He supposes James is a person that Bucky has been. Sergeant James Barnes. But Steve has never even said the name in reference to Bucky, aside from as an introduction in their younger years. He wonders if the two of them had actually spoken at all whilst he'd been waiting outside for the previous hour, because surely the mismatch between James Barnes on paper and Bucky Barnes in real life is hard to miss. 

"Did he have any hobbies before the war broke out? It would help him to get back some of his civilian self, rather than be sent straight back to his army life."

“Before the war, Bucky had some... I'm not sure...” He fumbles, but it feels important to continue, and he's seen enough of the twenty-first century to know that Bucky is not the only one, so he presses on. “...That Bucky was really a man.”

The sentence sounds clumsy out loud and he wants to rephrase it, take it back. But Dr Grant is a therapist, and a woman, and she's from this century – she looks young enough that even her degree must be from this century, and so far she's been kind and amicable. Steve would never have told anyone that about Bucky in the '40s, but he knows about gay rights and he saw Eurovision and he thinks they must be ready for this kind of thing right now.

But she just looks at him with a confused smile. “I've seen his file, two testicles present and correct.”

Steve shakes his head. “Not... Not that kind of man. I mean, I think Bucky might have wanted to be a da- a girl. A woman, or something.”

“Like a transsexual?” She asks, and he gives her a blank look because although he's heard the word he doesn't actually know what it means. She takes it as confirmation, though. “I wouldn't want to be too hasty with a diagnosis of Gender Identity Disord-"

“–There's nothing wrong with _Bucky_!” He insists, frustration rising. She isn't the first therapist to annoy him, he thinks it's probably part of their job, but he's not having Bucky's - Bucky dragged into it. The last thing Bucky needs is something else wrong to compete with half a century of trauma.

He is also not the first patient to have reacted to something a psychologist has said with anger, however.

“Steve.” Dr Grant puts her palms out flat, obviously telling him to calm down, and he does so with considerable effort. “Steve,” She says again once his breathing has returned to normal. “I know that you want the best for – for " _Bucky_ ," but what you need to remember is that he has been through some extremely traumatic events.”

Steve nods slowly, expecting her to continue, and expecting her to say something he doesn't want to hear.

“The kind of brainwashing that " _Bucky"_ has been through was strong enough to erase his entire sense of self. It's very important that we help with the reformation of his identity as he is acclimatising to living in the twenty-first century and without the threat of harm for the first time in seventy years.” It all sounds very reasonable, and Steve has to accept that she knows more about this stuff than him. “Now, what we _do not_ want to do, is to make that process any more confusing or isolating than it has to be. So, what I as a doctor,  _and_  as a psychologist think we should do is to get him used to the idea of being James Barnes again, and if, _if_ the feelings of gender dysphoria do come back with his memories, I will personally assess him and refer him to a gender specialist. Does that sound reasonable?”

Steve swallows, because it does, but – “So that's a disorder now? It's like a... A treatable condition?”

Grant smiles at him, the tight psychiatrist smile that he knows from his own therapist. “Yes. If in, say, a year's time, James comes to me and says he feels this way for himself, I can refer him to someone who will prescribe him female hormones and who can in turn refer him to a surgeon.”

“A surgeon?” Steve swallows again, throat dry now, head full of images of electrodes and lobotomies and chemical castration –

“It's now possible to surgically create a vagina, out of the skin from the penis, I think, but I'm not a surgeon. There's also breast enhancement, it's possible to shave down the Adam's apple, and a number of other treatments are available.” Dr Grant smiles as though reading from a spa brochure.

“Oh.” The thought of Bucky changing yet again terrifies him, but he's not about to stand in the way of anything Bucky needs to be happy, not any more. “Okay.”

“Okay. Well, I'm glad we've cleared that up.” Grant shuffles her notes demonstratively and stands to shake his hand. “I'm due to see James again on the sixth, and then on the ninth, at 2pm on both days. Will you be bringing him?”

“Uh, yeah, sure. See you then.”

Steve lets her herd him out of her consulting room and into the waiting room for what remains of SHIELD's continuing medical services to former agents and staff. Bucky is sitting staring straight ahead in one of the chairs, Steve's presence barely even registering.

He sits in the next chair along. “You ready to go, Buck?”

Bucky shrugs and returns to fiddling with the lock of the thick ankle monitor that was one of the conditions for Bucky being allowed to leave the secure containment unit that Steve was sure had been designed with Banner in mind.

“You can't take that off, Buck, I'm sorry,” Steve feels genuinely guilty. He takes Bucky gently by the elbow, grateful when his touch isn't rejected. “That ankle bracelet means you can't go outside this building. If you do, we'll know where you are and we'll come get you, okay?” He doesn't mean it to sound like a threat, but Bucky seems to change imperceptibly, fixating on some implications or fuzzy memory that Steve has no access to. “No one's gonna hurt you," He adds quickly, "But you've got to stay inside. And if you try to take it off they'll know too.”

He leads Bucky into the lift, which takes them straight to the floor they've been assigned by Pepper.

It has everything in it. A bedroom each as well as a spare, more than triple the size of the apartment they'd shared after Steve's mom died. His stuff has been moved in, along with some basic clothes for Bucky. Blue jeans and a rainbow of t-shirts as though the purchaser was attempting to deviate as far from a plain black uniform as possible.

At first Steve can't see a TV, but it hadn't taken too long to work out that practically every flat surface in the whole apartment is a screen. 

Not that this matters to Bucky, who spends a great deal of time watching blank stretches of wall.

 

Steve does as the doctor ordered. Well, mostly. He doesn't call Bucky “James” or a "man" or any of those other casual malenesses, telling himself that either Bucky knows already or it isn't really true.

Bucky attends all Dr Grant's appointments and listens carefully whilst Steve describes their old apartment and their lives, but otherwise gets frustrated with everything; confinement, amnesia, the existence of the full height freezer, which Steve is eventually forced to remove after Bucky rips it out of its fittings in protest. A lot of Bucky's time is spent reading histories with an attention to detail that Steve has only ever seen in Natasha on information gathering missions. It's unnerving, but it doesn't feel like he has the right to tell Bucky to stop it, either. 

 In an attempt to make some sense of it all to Bucky, Steve retrieves the tiny treasure troves of their remaining possessions that he has managed to regain from private collections and museum exhibits since he awoke. 

“What _is_ this?” Bucky shouts at him, holding a flat, hinged tin, whose cracked enamel showed it to be rusting merrily beneath the paint. Bucky's face furrowed in a frown that has yet to break into tears since moving into the new apartment. 

“It's your old watercolour set, you used--” Steve begins, but cuts off with a cry of dismay as it crumples in Bucky's metal hand. _Used to paint me pictures of the front and send them back. And I used to send you pictures of home because I missed you so much and I wanted you to have something of mine._  He'd taken the paintbox out purposefully, already decided exactly what he would say to Bucky when asked, scripted this conversation like a hundred others. Someone isn't sticking to the carefully planned lines. “Let it go Bucky!”

Bucky looks at him, indifferent to destruction, and Steve is submerged beneath the first of many waves of panic. It isn't _this_ Bucky's paint tin, it's the old Bucky's and how else is Steve to remember these things? Without thinking, he jerks it out of Bucky's hand hard enough for Bucky to topple sideways with a clatter of metal limbs against the tiled kitchen floor that leaves Steve's ears ringing.

Steve's heart hammers in his chest as he tries to control the cocktail of alarm and anger so strong it's giving him vertigo. He forces his breathing to slow, not to wrack his chest. Then he leans back against the wall and squeezes his eyes shut. He can feel his pulse, see it in the red flashes behind his eyelids. He hasn't ever had a panic attack, but maybe this is what it's like.

When he opens them again, Bucky just looks up at him with a lack of fear that could very well be rebellion. Or sadism, or perhaps a simple emptiness.

“Why did you do that?” Steve asks as quietly as he can, shaken both by Bucky's act and his own display of violence. It still sounds like an accusation. Loss throbs somewhere in his throat.

Bucky shrugs and meets his eyes until Steve has to look away, back down at the twisted metal of the tin.

“It was important to me,” Steve whispers shakily, turning away. He knows it's stupid, that he holds Bucky with him wherever he goes even without the paint tin. But no one is allowed to crush that memory, not even Bucky Barnes.

Bucky might not cry, never cries, but Steve can feel the tears burning behind his eyes. He leaves Bucky sitting on the floor and locks himself into his own room, slamming his face down into a pillow to muffle his own groan.

It's amazing, really, how ill prepared he is for losing somebody who he's already lost once, but he clutches the water colour set, all bent out of shape, and tries not to choke or scream or shout as it hits him, all over again that Bucky's body is in the next room, but that _his_ Bucky was dead the moment James Buchanan Barnes stepped onto the battlefield. Bucky never was the same on the front, and now, now Steve isn't so sure that there's any of the old Bucky left at all.

It's wrong to be angry with whoever _is_  left, but he can't help it. The growling in his throat turns to bitter sobs and loss and he's temporarily _furious_ that this – this _imposter_ could come in wearing Bucky's body to break Steve's heart all over again, like some kind of cruel joke.

His anger dies down as he exhausts himself, no longer directed at the confused, damaged person still sitting on the floor outside. _Why does this have to happen to me?_ He demands silently of God, his first prayer, if it could be called such, since his rude and icy reawakening.  _Because I was the one who brought Bucky back there. If hadn't asked, Bucky would never have fallen._

He makes up his mind, for the hundredth time since he ripped the Winter Soldier's mask away, to do his best by Bucky, and let this new version live their own life and not the one Steve is desperately holding on to. Dr Grant was right, it isn't fair of him to confuse Bucky when Bucky is barely even a person at the moment.

He follows her instructions with renewed vigour, and Bucky doesn't ask any more questions or touch any of Steve or the old Bucky's things again, because Steve puts them back away in his own bedroom, where they can be safe from further harm.

 

Bucky doesn't make any progress. Sits in Lysse Grant's sessions and says as little as possible, glaring at her to shut up but not daring to act on the urge to do it for her under the strict surveillance obvious throughout the building. Steve worries that maybe Bucky hates her, but Bucky doesn't seem to like very much. Bucky lives in a world of fright and frustration, getting more bitter by the second. Bucky hates 21st century fruit, but doesn't compare it to the more flavourful fruits Steve remembers. Doesn't like TV, or laugh at any jokes, doesn't thank Steve for any of his help, not that Steve expects it.  Doesn't reminisce about the pictures they used to see together or tell old jokes; Bucky is simply dissatisfied with the present with no standard to compare it to, and apparently no need for one.

Steve answers Bucky's questions but tries to leave them open for Bucky to provide the real answers, and is usually met with disappointment. An hour of careful bending sets the tin back in order, but the paints themselves – the odd scraps of red and black and the crumbly blocks of unpopular colours – all cracked under the initial pressure, and Steve can neither bear to look at them nor to replace them or chuck them out. They represent something real that Bucky, _his_ Bucky had touched and loved and carried around just to send him those little paintings.

He has one still; recovered it with some of his stuff sent to him by a museum in London after he woke up. It shows boys, barely men at all really, marching on the front, their muddy features and gaunt expressions warped by the bright red Bucky had used to paint their lips. It seems morbid given the context. It's a postcard, just a blank square of thin card with a few cramped lines of handwritten text on the back, the only thing Steve still has in Bucky's handwriting. He doubt's it's the same now, hasn't seen Bucky holding a pen at all. 

_June 10 th, 1944_

_Dear Steve,_

_We lost Marlon today. I know you didn't know him, but pray for him will you? He was a good kid and I was never the religious type. I wrote you about him a couple of months ago. He got hit by shrapnel and we were so busy trying to stop his leg bleeding that none of us noticed the gash in his arm till it was too late._

_Miss you buddy, I really do. I'd say "wish you were here," but you know how I feel about that. Wish I was with you instead._

_Bucky._

Beneath Bucky's name is a kiss, not an X, but the kind Bucky would've given Steve had they both been at home together; aquamarine paint – one of the few left in abundance in Bucky's palette – painted onto lips and kissed onto the page.

It's unbearable to mourn Bucky without a single friend in common to share it with. Steve grieves Peggy's kind words and her hand on his shoulder almost deeply as he grieves for Bucky's firm slaps on the back and rough hugs, misses Peggy's red lipstick against her brown hair, and Bucky's darker red brushing on Steve's jaw. It used to stain his skin, he remembers. He'd wash it off, but the next morning the other kids at school would laugh and joke about the kind of girl Steve must've found to get her to kiss a guy with a crooked spine and a chest that rattled like a broken motor before it backfires.

It had been Bucky's bruised knuckles that fought their jibes back.

For months after the museum had sent it to him, Steve couldn't even look at the card, let alone read it. Now, he clutches Bucky's kiss to his chest when he goes to bed, and cries, not the numb, dignified tears he'd cried after Bucky had fallen, but something raw and more terrible that makes him retch, like he had as a child after his mom passed, when he could barely breath for tears. The person who used to be Bucky doesn't come and comfort him in the night like the old Bucky would have.

 

Steve steps back from Bucky, and Bucky doesn't seem to notice. _Seem_ , because Bucky notices everything: The food Steve cooks, Dr Grant ending an appointment three minutes early (Bucky gets the full hour, even if those last three minutes are spent sitting in silence. Steve holds out a little hope that if the Depression has survived within Bucky, something else might have too), the clothes Steve orders online to replace the ragged leather scraps remaining of Bucky's uniform and the weirdly bright rainbow shirts picked out by whoever Pepper had delegated the job to. 

Despite not being alone a single minute of the day – except by self imposed isolation in his room – Steve feels lonelier than he ever has.

A knock on the door startles him, and seeing Sam's face when he opens it surprises him further, because Steve seems to have forgotten that he has friends.

“Long time no see,” Sam says, and Steve can see that he's not impressed. But Sam isn't there to admonish him, or to respect the time honoured custom of being _invited_ in, and simply steps round him holding a bag containing the large square boxes Steve has come to understand means pizza. “I bought pizza, but I only brought raspberries for dessert since I haven't seen _you_  running lately. Not that you probably need it to keep in shape, damn super soldiers. ”

“Yeah, sorry about that.” Steve shakes his head. “I've, uh, been a little overwhelmed.”

His admission seems to appease Sam and they settle into the living room; Bucky isn't there, not that Bucky stays confined to any particular room in the daytime.

“So... Tell me a little more about this _overwhelming_.”

Steve shrugs, grabbing a slice from the pizza at the top of the pile and burning his mouth on it. “I dunno,” He says when he's done sucking air. "Bucky... I just don't know that there's any of the old Bucky in there.”

Sam nods. “I know we talked about it as a possibility, but that's gotta be tough.”

“Yeah,” Steve sniffs, putting his pizza down. He doesn't feel so hungry any more, and the fact that the food attacked him just compounds the sick feeling in his stomach. “I... Don't know if I can do it. I mean, I _have_ to do it,” He says, gesturing at Sam to not interrupt. “I need to do it for myself and for the old Bucky, and I know I couldn't live with myself if I gave up on Buck, but... It's... It's _really_ hard, Sam.”

Sam swallows and wipes his mouth on a paper towel. “You know you don't have to do this on your own, right? I'll come here every day if you need me to. And I'm not the only one."

“I know,” He says, even though the idea hasn't actually occurred to him. “But why is it Bucky can remember _me_ and not remember _Bucky_? I mean, only some things about me, like not to kill me, but Bucky hasn't told Lysse about remembering anything and barely even talks to me at all, after the paint set.” Steve knows he's gushing and that he's already turned the visit sour, but he's been waiting for someone that isn't paid to hear it for almost three weeks and he's all out of patience.

“What happened with the paint set?”

Steve tells him about it, the whole thing, and how much it hurt that Bucky didn't recognise it and how ashamed he is for pushing Bucky over, and maybe it's _his fault_ that Bucky isn't talking to him, and it was Bucky's after all, so really isn't it Bucky's to destroy?

And then he shows him Bucky's postcard and cries some more of his most toned-down, audience friendly tears, saved up from the night before. Sam doesn't comment on the kiss, but Steve knows he sees it. Whatever he makes of the turquoise pout, he grabs Steve into a rough hug. Which just makes Steve want to cry harder: that was always Bucky's job.

They emerge from Steve's bedroom more than an hour later to find Bucky in the living room, looking pointedly disinterested in a way that suggests the soundproofing in the walls of Starks tower is probably inadequate.

Steve lets out one last sob at the sight of those lips crushing a raspberry softly between them so that the juice runs down and into the cleft of Bucky's chin. He swallows the sound as soon as he's made it, but there's no doubt that Bucky can tell he's crying if Bucky is at all interested.

They turn on the news and eat in silence as Steve tries not to shudder too noticeably with the aftershocks of his second? Third? Fourth breakdown this week.

By the time Sam is packing up to leave, Bucky has eaten most of the raspberries alone, and announces unprompted: “Raspberries are my favourite fruit.”

“Blackberries are your favourite fruit!” Steve corrects before he can stop himself. He catches a worried glance from Sam and swallows his own guilt. It's the only thing Bucky has said all evening, and the only positive thing in possiby decades, and he's already shot it down. 

“Not for taste. Only for colour,” Bucky says, heedless of Steve's tone of voice, tongue flicking out to smear juice over raspberry tinted lips. And then Bucky stands and goes to bed, leaving Steve more conflicted than he's ever been, even with the paint box.

 

Steve lies on top of his blankets and tries to figure out what Bucky had meant. For colour of what? General aesthetics? Emergency art supplies? Still life?

But he remembers Bucky dragging him miles out of town when they were small to the country when blackberries were in season, skipping school with the promise of a sweet reward and a day of freedom. Crushing fistfuls of berries until they bled black in their hands, Bucky letting it linger on both of their mouths to stain them purple.

Getting home way past dark in snagged, stained clothes to Bucky's irate mother. She'd once threatened to march them back out to Old Westbury and cut them a bramble switch, but like most of her punishments, it was a threat she never made good on, since, "Steve always looks so tired he might die on the return journey." She just had to settle for giving them dirty looks, cuffed ears and blackberry and apple pie instead. The nuns at school were less forgiving, but every year until Bucky was fifteen, Steve had somehow let himself get talked into going; the memory of whatever the punishment had been the year before always seemed to fade over the summer vacation.

Steve desperately needs to know the answer, though he doubts Bucky would even be able to tell him any more information if he asked.

He falls asleep with that image in mind: Bucky young and wicked and beautiful, lips glistening and purple like they've been bitten and the light in Bucky's eyes as that red-black-purple juice runs down out of clenched fists to be licked off of elbows and stain shirt sleeves.

He dreams of young men with blood smiles crossing over trenches from the previous war, of Bucky running a paintbrush over the lacquered surface of the turquoise block of colour, turning it opaque and pale with water, and wakes drenched in a cold sweat, as though from a nightmare.

 


	2. Blackberries

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things are never as simple as you want them to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This will probably be a four chapter story now. I guess three was always gonna be a little optimistic, so unless I post the last one as a superlong chapter, this is chapter 2 of 4. It can't get any longer or I'll run out of appropriately coloured fruit.

When he talks to Dr Grant, she knocks his hopes down almost immediately. “Steve, you know I'm not your doctor, but I think it might be helpful if we talked about your feelings for a bit.”

“Okay,” He nods cautiously, already beginning to feel the way he always did when his own SHIELD assigned therapist told him something he didn't want to hear.

“It sounds to me like you're really struggling with the grieving process for _Bucky_ ,” She says, with her flat, sympathetic smile. It matches her sympathetic smart casual suit, and her open-at-the-neck. you-can-talk-to-me blouse, just barely exposes the kind of clean white teeth that money can buy.

He gives her a look, confirming what she's said without really wanting to.

“In the session before this one, James told me about the watercolour tin,” She tells him when he doesn't say anything, and even though he's only been in her consulting room for less than five minutes, Steve feels guilty, as though he was keeping the incident from her.

“Really?” Steve says, too late, because Bucky rarely tells anyone anything.

But Lysse doesn't give him what he wants – an account of how Bucky described the encounter – instead she continues, “Yes. Have you heard of the Kubler-Ross model? It's sometimes referred to as the five stages of grief.”

“No,” It's just another of those things that came after Steve's time. As far as he's concerned, the five stages of grief are crying, wearing black, a funeral, a long conversation with the trinity and then getting over it. Not that he ever made it to step five for Bucky. 

“When we grieve, people typically go through five different emotional states,” She's subtle about it, but he notices her move the box of tissues a little closer. “The first stage is denial.”

“I'm not in denial,” He interrupts, wishing he was. “I know I've lost him. It's just...”

She nods her psychiatrist's nod and ignores his rambling. “But you were. You were in denial about it up until the moment that James didn't understand the paint box and ruined it, and then you entered the second stage, of anger.”

Steve feels sick to the stomach with guilt, and at the same time he's relieved that someone who has some kind of authority on the matter has come in to excuse his behaviour during that incident. He stays silent and feels a lot in common with Bucky's tightly closed lips.

“After anger,” Grant says gently, “People experience what we call the bargaining stage, when they're still in a form of denial, but the false reality of their denial stage in which they think they can still have the person they love no longer holds up. They... Offer trades, to have certain parts of the person they loved back. It's quite common for people to say “If I just had _one more day_ ” or “ _one last hug_ ,” or to feel like they can offer something and get back a part of that person in exchange.”

Steve holds his breath, desperately wishing he hadn't heard and wanting her to stop talking.

She doesn't. “What you're doing, is projecting those things onto James, or the person who isn't James and now exists in James' body.”

Steve shakes his head, but he doesn't have the words to tell her she's wrong, and that's probably because she _isn't._

“You believe that if you spend a lot of time with him, and you encourage James to be more feminine that you can _access_ that part of the old Bucky, even if it's a part that wasn't well to begin with.” She pauses for Steve to angrily yank a tissue from the box. _Wasn't well_ slips by him as he bites his cheek and tries not to cry. “And normally I would allow you to go through that stage of grief at your own pace.”

Steve blows his nose and wipes his eyes and wonders why she can't just allow him to anyway.

“But you're not my patient, Steve. James Barnes _is_ my patient, and I have to act in what I believe to be _his_ best interests. This isn't healthy for him. You have to let it go.” She reaches over the coffee table and rests a hand on his shoulder in a gesture that could never be mistaken for anything less than professional. “I'm sorry, Steve. I know it's difficult, and I wish there was something I could do to make this easier, but grief is one of the things that make us human.”

And just like that, she deflects his silent anger away from her and back out to the universe in general. And it's true, it really isn't her fault that he's lost Bucky; she isn't taking Bucky away from him, just looking out for the person who is now her patient. “I'm sorry," Steve says thickly, taking another tissue from the box. "I've made you run over.” 

“Not at all, I don't have another patient until four. I'll see you on Tuesday at James' next appointment.”

 

 

Steve cleans himself up and goes back into the waiting room, where Bucky is sitting on the same chair as usual, fiddling with a cube of blu-tack.

“ _Come on James_ ,” He forces, heading for the elevator.

Bucky follows with a single confused blink, and as usual, says nothing for the entire thirty six floors between the medical facility and their apartment.

 

 

Steve's conservatorship over Bucky is renewed, to be reviewed in six months.

Even though it guarantees that Bucky will stay with him it feels like just another way he's failed the only surviving member of what Steve considers to be his family.

 

 

Bucky is quieter than usual for the next few days, and Steve puts it up to a similar dressing down from Dr Grant to what he himself had experienced. They go to the next appointment without a similar incident, and the next, and Bucky stays away from Steve, locked up in the library two floors up, or in the land of the internet, reading summaries of every major event for the last seventy years.

Bargaining, as Steve himself has read on the internet, soon gives way to depression. Getting out of bed is a chore, and their clothes go unwashed two weeks in a row. He'd never planned on living a life without Bucky, and here he is, trying to get used to it for a second time. He just can't see the point.

Sam comments on his rumpled clothes, offering to stay over and give him a hand, but a voice in the back of Steve's mind that he knows to be a liar tells him that Sam has better things to do with his time and is only offering out of duty, so he declines.

The next morning, Steve gets up and gives himself the shock of his life when he rounds the corner into the kitchen and trips over Bucky, who is sat cross legged on the floor next to the washing machine.

“Whoa! Oh - you scared me, Buck.” The nickname spills out unchecked even after days of trying not to use it.

“What do all these hieroglyphs mean?” Bucky holds out the label on a pair of Steve's jeans. “How do I use this machine?”

Bucky sits patiently and learns whilst Steve explains that these jeans cannot be tumble dried and that you need to put the detergent in one drawer and fabric conditioner in another and how to turn the machine on. “I usually wash things at 90 degrees unless they're really dirty, and then I wash them at 140.”

Once he's taken a few t-shirts out to make sure the overloaded machine can actually spin, he stands up. Bucky is still looking at him from the floor.

“Sorry.”

Steve shakes his head, not bothering to hide his happiness at Bucky engaging with anything of practical use. “It's okay, you were trying to help and I should've been looking where I was going. It took me plenty of times to work out how to use these modern appliances.”

“No,” Bucky follows him up, still watching him intently with the same piercing gaze that had stopped Steve in his tracks when he'd first encountered the Winter Soldier. “About the watercolours.”

“Oh,” Steve blushes, embarrassed at his own behaviour. “It's okay, I shouldn't have... Reacted like that. I'm sorry too.”

He watches to see how Bucky will react, but it seems that the event is already over in Bucky's eyes, and Bucky leaves to do whatever reading it is to be done today.

When he's alone, Steve sits back down against the washing machine and tries to decide what apologising meant to Bucky. He'd somehow assumed that the destruction of the watercolour box was malicious or some kind of callousness left over from years spend ripping lives away from innocent people. Now he wonders whether it had anything to do with that at all. 

 

Steve feels a little better after the washing machine affair and seems to regain his ability to do housework – although admittedly, Bucky's modest help has lessened the load to what feels like a more manageable level.

He finally feels able to cook again instead of getting take out, and intentionally doesn't cook anything that could've been considered one of Bucky's old favourites. It's better to avoid hope altogether than live with the scale of disappointment he's been subjecting himself to.

“James, dinner is ready!” He shouts, stirring a last handful of cheese into the risotto. He doesn't think he ever ate risotto back in the war, or indeed before it, but new recipes come without old memories, and he likes rice.

When he turns around to take the pan to the table, Bucky is already so close that he nearly drops their dinner in shock. His nose bounces off Bucky's bowed forehead and explodes in pain.

“Why do you keep calling me that?” Bucky asks, and it's more accusation than question.

“What?” Steve asks, a little weakly as he sidesteps and the meal makes it to the table in one piece.

“James,” Bucky sits down opposite him. “You always used to call me Bucky.”

Steve wonders at the time frame of Bucky's “always used,” but doesn't ask in case it's measured in months rather than decades. Carefully, he says, “Is something wrong with James?”

Bucky frowns and looks down, and Steve feels like he's been selfishly withholding Bucky's old name from this new person out of some form of possession rather than the care Dr Grant had implied.

“Hey?” He calls softly, hoping that Bucky hasn't sunk too deep into the vague, thousand mile stare that Steve is getting used to when he says something too harsh or upsetting. He puts Bucky's food down on the table, hoping the sound of porcelain on wood will somehow ground them both in the moment. “I'm sorry. If you don't like James, of course I won't call you that. Bucky?”

Bucky looks up at him, then down at the food, and then picks up a fork and begins eating without further comment.

 

 

“Bucky doesn't like to be called James,” He says at Dr Grant's next appointment.

She just looks at him. “Steve, we've talked about this. I'll call James “Bucky” from the moment he asks me himself.”

 

 

Sam comes back with more pizza and this time, he brings blackberries. “Sorry I've not been here these last few days, Sarah's seven months pregnant now and the whole family is on eggshells because of her antenatal depression. My brother-in-law bought her a box of chocolates the other day and she ate the whole thing in one go, and then cried about her figure. We told her it was the real baby and not the food baby, but she still blamed him for buying them in the first place.”

It's nice not to talk about him and Bucky for a change. “You looking forward to being an uncle?”

Sam grins at him, because he is, but instead he says, “I'm looking forward to when my sister stops phoning to tell me she has cravings for charcoal. You know how weird that is? I was at the pharmacy counter at Walmart and she _made_ me ask if they had any “food grade” charcoal in the store.” He pushes Steve out the way and makes his way through to the living room to put the pizza on the coffee table. “What's even weirder is that they _did_.”

Steve manages to relax for the first time in days as they talk and watch The Simpsons, which Steve has come to like due to its lack of anything generally upsetting. He thinks Sam might be vetting the episodes for him.

Bucky appears as expected, shortly before their usual mealtime and wolfs down a slice of ham and pineapple after picking off the ham and eating that first. Steve wonders how Bucky feels about having not been properly invited, but if anything's amiss, Bucky doesn't show it.

When they're all mostly finished eating, Sam takes the blackberries out and puts the punnet on top of the boxes. They both watch Bucky, but Bucky doesn't pick a single one up. Steve tries not to be disappointed, but somehow he is. He doesn't know why but he'd thought, he'd _hoped_ that... He doesn't know. Something. A repeat performance. 

Sam stays the night, because it's late, but also Steve thinks because he's trying to get rid of a backlog of worry and doesn't believe Steve will ask if he needs help.

Sam takes the spare room, and Steve only feels the loss in his stomach grow heavier.

He settles into bed and turns off the lights, only to be frightened out of his skin by the heavy thud-thud on his door that means it's Bucky's metal arm knocking.

“Jesus!” He curses under his breath. “You gotta stop scaring me like that.”

When he opens the door, all he can think is that he needs to call 911.

“Holy shit, Bucky, you're –” Bleeding from the wrist and mouth.

Covered in fruit.

Bucky doesn't seem to take in Steve's alarm, just holds out a bleeding fistful of berries and wipes away what had looked like blood dripping from a split lower lip onto a stained nightshirt. “I made a mess.”

Steve sighs in relief. “It's okay, Bucky, we'll get you cleaned up.”

The kitchen is covered with it. “I think I stained the couch. I tried to find something to clean it with, but the red just keeps getting... More everywhere.”

Bucky's voice is faint, but not childish, like Steve's had been with a fever or on cocktails of pain killing medicine before the serum, when he just couldn't quite find the words. 

Sam pokes his head out the spare room door and Steve can feel him quietly observing. And Steve... Feels more relieved than he should. More hopeful than is good for him.

He has Bucky put the pulped fruit into the kitchen sink and then they both go through into the bathroom, trying not to dye the rug and mostly failing.

Bucky's shirt is a lost cause, but Steve is still surprised when Bucky puts it straight in the bin, because Steve is _there_ and Steve's barely been allowed to touch or stare too long or do anything that could be considered suspicious to the Winter Soldier since 1945. He doesn't look at the changes, pointedly ignores how the person living in Bucky's body isn't living in  _Bucky's_ body at all, rather a warped and scarred version, with some bits missing and others added on. 

He rinses Bucky's hands gently under warm water, and Bucky lets him wipe the worst of the juice off with a wash cloth. It leaves little stained rivulets on Bucky's arm and chin and neck and sticks in the grooves of the metal. With the bathroom light on, Steve can see the purple lips. He doesn't have the heart to wipe them down.

“Were you trying to make yourself pretty?” He asks, wanting badly to know exactly what Bucky had been thinking when smearing their living room with soft fruit.

But, like a ghost, Bucky just grins at him and says without missing a beat: “I am pretty.”

Steve smiles back, and it might just be for the first time since the War. Bucky _is_ pretty, for all the untamed long hair and smudged stains and the dark hollows of Bucky's eyes that give the impression that the Winter Soldier's make up never quite washed off, Bucky is still beautiful. Then the moment is gone, and his friend forgets about the terrible mess in favour of going straight to bed, marching out of the bathroom so abruptly it leaves Steve swaying in Bucky's wake, holding a wash cloth that until a minute before had been snow white.

Sam is already salvaging the couch when Steve comes back out.

“Don't worry too much about that,” Steve tells him, too tired to be bothered with doing any more than a quick flick of the mop over the kitchen floor. “Stark'll probably just buy me a new one in the morning.” It's surprising how after living through scarcity tends to drive people one of both ways: Either wastefulness is unthinkable, or it is a luxury. For Steve, it is usually the first, but he's just too tired to care any more.

“You know,” Sam keeps his voice low. “It's not that uncommon for people to develop other serious mental health problems after trauma, psychosis or something. That could've been some kind of episode, you ought to mention it to his psychiatrist.”

Steve shakes his head and shoves the mop back into its cupboard. He already knows he won't be mentioning this incident to Lysse Grant. “No, that was... something Bucky always did.”

Sam gives him an odd look.

“Not the covering the house in blackberries and then waking you up in the night thing,” He clarifies. “Bucky used to crush them up and use them like make-up when we were kids. It wasn't usually so messy at the time.”

Steve waits for Sam's response with half baited breath, watching to make sure he isn't shocked or disgusted.

But after a few seconds, Sam smiles. “Another one of those “real men,” huh?”

“Yeah, the original man's man, Bucky,” He says, and the words feel wrong even laced with sarcasm. As is increasingly the case, Steve wants to tell him everything now that he's let a little bit slip. “Bucky always used to love all that... Girl's stuff. I dunno.”

They both sit down on the couch, avoiding the purple splotches. “So was Bucky like, a drag queen?”

“No, it wasn't like... There wasn't a performance. It was the real deal.” He wonders if he's saying this for Bucky's benefit or his own, but it's too late to do anything but hope it was the former.

Sam processes the information and does, to Steve, look shocked at this last piece of information, but not appalled by it. He decides this is alright. "You know there are words for that now right? Transsexual or transgender, I think that's more popular these days. No idea which one's which, but they're definitely both a thing."

"Yeah, I heard about it on the TV." There's a few moments of silence before Steve suddenly feels like he wants to tell on Dr Grant. “Bucky's shrink won't let me tell Bucky.”

“What? Why?” Sam's voice has definitely risen into what constitutes Bucky's audible range, but Steve doesn't feel much like hushing him, drunk on a sense of righteousness he prays to God will carry through to the morning.

“She says it's a disorder and it'd be cruel to confuse Bucky any more than Bucky already is.” He feels like a tattle-tail, but Sam is as much of an authority on PTSD as Grant is, just in a different way, and it feels undeniably good to snitch. “She says it would make things more complicated than they need to be.”

“Yeah, more complicated for _her_!” Sam looks cross, and cross is fine by Steve. He gestures wildly as he speaks. “You can't _rebuild_ a person by keeping something that close to – to the core of their identity from them!”

And then the righteous anger dies in his chest, because it's exactly what Steve's done. His face falls, like that of a morose drunk reaching a tipping point. “I shouldn't have gone along with it.”

“And h-sh-they–Bucky hasn't said anything about it to the psych?” Sam asks, not letting Steve wallow, but still trying to get his head around it.

“I don't think so,” Steve says sadly. He thinks this might be his fault, for going along with it. He doesn't look at Sam. “We grew up in the twenties and thirties. For all Bucky knows and can maybe remember, it's the kind of thing that gets you arrested still. Maybe Bucky doesn't even remember showing me...”

He lapses into a maudlin silence and Sam sighs loudly. “When's the next appointment?”

“Tomorrow afternoon.”

“You're gonna have to say something.” Sam gets up and puts the cloth back in the kitchen.

“I know,” Steve groans, pressing the heels of his palms to his eyelids. But at least he knows what the right thing to do _is_.

 


	3. White Peaches

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay so it might just be time for me to accept that this isn't going to be four chapters long. It might be five. But you never know. Sorry for the ages between updates, I had exams and life stuff and then also a lot of difficulty with this chapter which has now been solved by the realisation that it is actually clearly two chapters, the first of which I'm posting now and the latter is half written.  
> Thank everyone who's read this and commented! Sorry again for the long wait!
> 
> Warnings: Ableism, more shitty therapy

“James refused to talk to me today,” Grant says lightly as Steve takes his seat in her consulting room. Or rather, takes her seat, because she's sat in the one he usually takes. It instantly irritates him in a way that he knows is both irrational on his part and intentional on hers.

Steve can't resist a slight dig. “Maybe Bucky just doesn't like talking to you.” He knows she won't tell him what Bucky says on the days that they do talk, but he's still burning to know. He wonders if maybe he could get her to reveal it out of sympathy, but there's no doubt she's been ignoring manipulative clients for years.

The psychiatrist shrugs, equally immune to people who don't like her. “Maybe.”

Steve can feel her watching him, and he hates it. But he doesn't know what to say, so he plays her at her own game until it becomes obvious he isn't going to say anything more.

“Did something happen?” She asks, in a tone that says she doesn't want to imply anything, but she strongly believes that Bucky's silence is a product of something Steve has done. There's no tissue box this time. Instead, she reorganises her desk around him as she waits.

“Nothing worth reporting,” Slips out like they're in a military debrief. Steve has no idea how he ended up on the back foot even though he's holding most of the cards, when he came in here fully intending to say she was damaging his friend and to tell her where she could shove it. So he adds, “Bucky's not really very talkative at the best of times.”

“No, he's not,” Grant runs her tongue over her perfectly straight teeth. Everyone in America has weirdly uniform teeth now. Steve remembers kids with buckteeth and women with gaps between their teeth big enough to fit dime through, and old people with some teeth missing all together, the rest brown with age. Now the only variation is the colour on a pre-teen's braces. “But it's very unusual for him to say nothing at all, it hasn't happened since our second appointment together. I can't help but think, Steve, that it might have something to do with _your_ attitude towards therapy.”

“What?” He grimaces, as though she's suggested out of the blue that he wants to sleep with his mother or whatever Freudian garbage shrinks used to talk back in his day, and he suspects still do. “I don't have a problem with Bucky getting help, Bucky _needs_ help.” He bites back the comment sitting on the tip of his tongue about Dr Grant being the opposite.

“I just wanted to make sure we both have the same aims here.”

Steve can't afford to tantrum. Can't afford to fight, he doesn't want to upset the progress Bucky's made. Doesn't want to risk her saying that Steve is unfit to be Bucky's conservator. “We do. All I want is for Bucky to be as happy and as confident in... In terms of identity as possible, and I know that means therapy.”

“But you still won't call him James.” Lysse challenges, looking straight into his eye as though it's something Steve has to confront.

He stands up from his chair. “I'll start calling Bucky “James” from the moment Bucky asks me.”

Steve doesn't slam the door, just closes it neatly behind him so that Dr Grant can't follow him out without being seen to do so by the receptionist.

 

Bucky is in the waiting room, on the same chair as always, twisting the ankle bracelet around in stiff circles and waiting for Steve.

“Come on Buck.” Steve leads Bucky into the elevator, and once the doors are safely closed he asks, “Are you talking today?” Because he and Bucky haven't spoken yet this morning beyond Steve's greetings, but that in itself isn't unusual. Bucky likes the quiet, doesn't like every action or few hours of independence to be accounted for by Steve, and Steve understands. He'd hate the confinement and the babysitting just the same if it were him.

Bucky shrugs. “Only to some people.”

The lift stops and two of Tony's admin staff get in, each trying to pretend they aren't staring at Captain America. Steve thinks that's the end of the conversation, but Bucky evidently has other ideas. “I had a dream in the night.”

Steve wishes the two women weren't with them for the sake of Bucky's privacy, but he can't pick the moments Bucky chooses to tell him things, and neither can he pass them up. “What was it about?”

“She was angry with me,” Bucky says, staring at Steve's reflection in the mirrored door of the elevator.

“Doctor Grant?” She's really the only woman in Bucky's life at the moment, but Steve can't think of any better prompts and Bucky is liable to stop talking otherwise.

“She hit me and she made me wash my mouth,” Bucky tells him with no regard for the office workers standing behind them. “Because if I didn't I was going to get sick.”

Steve frowns, unable to place the information but feeling somehow that it must be something more than just a dream. Maybe Bucky heard him talking to Sam last night.

But Bucky, brow creasing slightly, still isn't finished, seems determined to tell Steve the whole thing now that the women are getting off a dozen floors below theirs. “I shouldn't've been trying on the lipstick.”

Steve feels his stomach tighten and it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the elevator is moving again.

He steels himself for his confession when the doors finally open on their floor. Bucky seems happy to go off and continue reading whatever technical manual or historical document is currently in progress, but Steve halts the retreat with a hand on Bucky's left shoulder.

“Sit down here,” He says.

Bucky looks at a smudge of purple on the tan linen with a lack of recognition, followed by an expression of exaggerated guilt.

“It was me,” Steve admits.

"No," Bucky says slowly. "I had the blackberries, and-"

“I was the one who made you wash the lipstick off," Steve interjects in rush. "It wasn't a dream you had, it was just a memory that you got confused.”

Bucky doesn't say anything, doesn't make eye contact, just stares blankly ahead over the coffee table at the wall most frequently employed as a TV screen. Licks those soft pink lips, no longer dyed from last night, and then purses them tightly.

Steve's stomach clenches. He reaches out to touch Bucky's shoulder again, and then pulls back, feeling undeserving and guiltier than he had when he'd actually washed the lipstick off of Bucky's distraught teenage face. He doesn't want to touch Bucky in case Bucky's body is stiff and unforgiving. 

“Bucky,” Bucky isn't spacing out like normal, Bucky is _angry with him_ and even though that's happened plenty of times in this century, he still doesn't know how to deal with it. “It wasn't because you weren't allowed. You _could_ have gotten sick. That lipstick was my mom's, and she was very ill. I was scared you'd catch it, so I washed it off you.”

He can tell that Bucky is trying to connect what Steve has just said with the dreamt half-memories and flashes of feelings and places and people.

“Can I hug you?” Steve asks, hurt and hopeful.

“No,” Bucky replies, tone no different from how it would have been if Steve had made a passing comment about the weather.

“Oh. Okay.” He sits next to Bucky for several minutes and gets the impression that perhaps Bucky is punishing him. After that, Steve thinks it might be better if he was out of the way, and leaves Bucky to lock himself in his room.

After a few hours comes the heavy _thunk_ of Bucky's knuckles further contributing to the oddly pockmarked appearance of his bedroom door.

Bucky's face is still troubled, lips pulled tight across teeth. “If – If it's _allowed_ then... How come I don't have any of those things now?”

For a moment, Steve has no idea what _those things_ could be. Then it seems obvious. He chews the inside of his lip, not wanting to reveal that it's actually because for the last few months, Steve has been unwittingly conspiring with the person to whom Bucky has been revealing intimate thoughts and feelings to prevent it.

“I wasn't sure you wanted any...” It's a weak response and close to an outright lie. Steve can only hope it doesn't show. “Do you?”

Bucky gives him a look that says that for all Steve's deference of what to eat for dinner, asking what Bucky _actually wants_ is still nearly unfathomable as a concept. He tries a different tack. “Why did you do what you did with the blackberries the other day?”

Bucky blinks and sways slightly in the doorway. It takes a long moment to work out what Steve is referring to. “It's what they're for.”

“What is?” Steve presses gently.

Bucky looks at him, grim and pleading, like Steve's giving an impossible test and everything Bucky is rests on it.

“Come on, Bucky. I need to hear you say it. I can't lead you into this, you have to ask for what you need.” A part of him still wonders if this Bucky is his creation rather than a memory, a personality, and there's no way he can risk it.

“I – I – I didn't have to ask before,” Bucky stammers. The pinched expression is still there, but now Bucky looks angry and frightened, confused at Steve's requirements.

“What?”

“Before, _I didn't have to ask_ , why are you making me ask?” Bucky slaps a metal hand hard against the door frame as punctuation, but it splinters the wood and paint.

Steve doesn't understand. Maybe he never did, but he's tried his best and he wants it to be good enough. Bucky can't know, that he's been negotiating Dr Grant's orders and his own anxiety and loss and the horrible glimpses he gets of his best friend. He wants to believe that if Bucky did, it would all be good enough, and Bucky wouldn't be angry. “I...”

“No _I.”_ Bucky pumps the metal palm against the wall again, almost spitting in fury, and Steve jumps despite himself. “ _I_ don't need your _permission_ , or anyone else's. I'm not somebody's child, Steve! I don't need to _ask_.”

The words dry up in Bucky's throat, are no longer enough to express the unchecked anger in Bucky's eyes.

“You _kept this from me._ ” Bucky wheezes like the smaller, frailer Steve of long ago once had, rage bubbling up through too small a gap.

Bucky slams Steve's door shut in his face, sending flaked paint fluttering to the floor. The door hangs a little awkwardly in the frame.

Steve sits back down on the bed, stunned. He'd been expecting curiosity, forgiveness. Foolish as it now seems, he'd expected Bucky to be... Grateful too him, not angry. 

His fingers shake as he dials Natasha's number, though whether it's to ask for help or to confess he isn't sure.

“Hi?” Is her typical response to the phone when she hasn't been expecting a call.

“It's Steve,” He says, even though phones tell you who's calling before you even pick up these days.

“Yeah, I know. Is everything alright?” Steve can hear the frown in her voice and wonders if he sounds as panicked as he feels.

“I... Screwed everything up.”

 

 

Natasha must be worried, because she's over within the hour, from whatever undisclosed location she's been loitering in these past few weeks. She brings her curly blond hair with her, and Steve is surprised just how different she can look with such a minimal disguise.

“What the hell happened to your couch?” She demands, scuffing at a purple spot with the toe of her sneaker.

“Bucky happened to it,” Steve sighs, and sits down over the worst of the stains. He tries not to stare at her, but he can't get over the fact that if he saw her in the street, he'd've walked straight past. Maybe it's because she's dyed her eyebrows a mousy brownish colour so that it looks like her hair's been bleached from brown instead of red.

“Are you gonna tell me what happened or do I have to play detective?” Natasha bounces down next to him. “You said to bring make-up, does that mean Bucky's lost it and attacked you with a permanent marker? Because I don't think we're the same skin tone. I'm a white peach and you're clearly a warm natural beige.”

Steve gives her a heavily abridged account of the situation, from his conversations with Dr Grant to the blackberries to the argument they'd just had, and Natasha sits there through the entire thing with her face unreadable. At the end, she says, “Well, apart from the psychiatrist, this all sounds like good news.”

Steve laughs in surprise. “A lot of word's have changed meaning since '45 but I didn't expect “good news” to be one of them.”

“So you “made a boner”,” She teases, putting her feet up on the coffee table. “But isn't it a good thing that Barnes called you out on it? Wouldn't the old Bucky be just as pissed right now?”

“Well...” Steve isn't really in the mood for dick jokes. The truth is, he can't quite remember if she's correct: the memories of Bucky before the war and during it seem so different, so conflicting, that he isn't sure they'd both have reacted in the same way.

“And either way, at least it confirms that Bucky is capable of deciding something without your help. Barnes _remembers_ wanting something in a context that isn't about you, that's virtually a miracle after all that ECT,” She continues, patting his knee patronisingly. “So where's Bucky now?”

Steve gestures at the short corridor leading to Bucky's room. “Enter at your own risk, though. And I mean that in terms of hygiene as well as being violently evicted, Bucky won't let anyone in there, including to clean.” Some days Steve still feels lucky that Bucky washes at all. Personal care didn't seem to be high on the agenda after decades of not being a person and outsourcing all care to HYDRA employees.

Natasha shrugs and crosses to the door. “Hey, Barnes, get out here!”

Steve flinches, because he hates the idea of anyone _commanding_ Bucky to do anything. The door swings open to reveal a scowl and the general mess of Bucky's room.

She peers behind Bucky to observe the gloom. “Jeez, haven't you ever thought of cracking a window in there? Or opening the blinds maybe?”

“What do you want?” Bucky takes in the visitor and then looks over Natasha's shoulder to glare at Steve.

“I came to cure you and your boyfriend's massive under-reliance on the internet.”

“He's not my _boyfriend_ ,” Bucky spits, indicating the ankle bracelet. “He's my keeper.”

The truth of it sits heavily in Steve's chest, but he doesn't try to respond.

“Beats having a handler,” Natasha quips, entirely unfazed by the ice in Bucky's voice. “Steve can barely keep himself in line, let alone you. Now, are you gonna have a tantrum or are you actually coming out of your cave so we can sort this out? I'd advise the latter, since it looks like the guano is really building up in there.”

Steve doesn't hide his surprise when Bucky follows her back into the living room, albeit with an aura of quiet fury.

“Steve, get your laptop, I'm ending this weird thing you do where you phone a friend before you consult Google.” Natasha sits back on the sofa, and Bucky stands in the middle of the room in a zestless show of protest. “Not that I'm unwilling, or anything.”

“Oh wow, it lights up?” Steve asks as Natasha opens the screen. His sarcasm comes out shakey and falls flat, and Bucky glares at him as though he's farted in church.

Natasha ignores the whole exchange. “Kitten sneezes, surprises dog?”

Steve blushes, because it seems pathetic compared to the cold war analysis and technological manuals no doubt open on Bucky's computer. “I started on a serious website, honest. It's really easy to just get lost in there...” And the cat had been so cute.

“Wikipedia should be your best friend,” Natasha mumbles as she presses play, and a dog jumps on the screen.

“I prefer physical encyclopedias, or you know, JARVIS...” Which is half a lie, since he rarely consults either of those sources on anything. His primary encyclopedia is Sam.

“T-R-A-N-S-G-E-N-D-E-R. Easy as that.” She holds the laptop up to Bucky who stares blankly at the article.

“Who's this?”

“It's a word for people who, uh,” Reading cursorily over the first paragraph Natasha frowns. “God this is an awful definition. “The state of one's gender identity”? Well... Transgender is what you'd be if you weren't a man.”

Bucky considers her carefully and then looks to Steve, confused. “You mean... Like... a woman?”

“Yeah... Or something else.” Natasha winces slightly at her own minced words. “Look, you like wearing make up right?”

Bucky huffs a sharp breath and takes half a step back. Meets Steve's eye and grimaces. “It's _allowed_.”

“Of course it's allowed, Buck,” Steve sighs, breaking away from that piercing gaze. “You can be whoever you want to be. Natasha just thought you should know that there are lots of new words for that now.”

The list Natasha has pulled up seems almost endless. It seems to be a dictionary of some sort, and some of the words are familiar: Homosexual is still the same, but queer seems to have diversified and drag queen is in there as well. He sees fairy and poof and fruitcake, female impersonator and transvestite scroll by, but invert, swish and ponce are all missing. There are other ones he presumes are newer, a lot of gender words, a lot of things that end in “romantic”. There is a separate list of what Steve assumes are only genders.

Bucky peeps over the top of the screen, scanning it upside down. _Agender. Alyha. Androgyne. Aravani. Butch._ Natasha turns the laptop back around. _Bigender. Dee. Demigirl. Demiguy. Drag King. Drag Queen._ The frown only etches itself deeper on Bucky's face as the list slides by, word and definition, word and definition. _Fa'afafine. Femme. Genderfluid. Genderqueer. Hijra. Intergender. Kathoey. Mahu. Neutrois._ Bucky tries the last on for size, bitten lips silently forming the word before moving on.  _Pinapinnaine._ _Sadhin. Third Gender._ Bucky's chest heaves with powerful breath, nostrils flaring. _Tom, travesti, transvestite, two spirit_.

Bucky puts a metal fist through the screen of Steve's laptop. Steve jerks back on the couch and Natasha's hand reflexively grabs for her gun, but Bucky is unperturbed, teeth bared and nostrils flared in frustration. “How. Can. There. Be. So _many_. And them all. Be. The. Wrong. One?”

Neither of them have a reply. The laptop sparks and Natasha lets its remains slip out of her lap and onto the floor. The fan gives a last whir before the machine dies altogether. After a few seconds she says, “Well... People probably invent new ones all the time when they don't fit. Why else would there be so many?”

But Bucky isn't listening, is practically growling and anxiously pacing a short strip of the carpet. “No! _New_ is the problem! I'm _not_ new! I'm - an anachronism! None of these things fit me, because I'm not _from_ here!”

Finally relenting, Bucky slams down on the couch hard enough that Natasha bounces a few inches in the air and the structure inside of it crunches.

No matter how much Steve trusts Bucky, Natasha isn't about to sit arm to arm next to a recovering weapon. She kicks the laptop off her feet and gets to them, lip twitching nervously. “I'm going to the bathroom, and when I get back, no more technology will have been broken,” She says, before retreating with carefully concealed caution.

“I'm really sorry, Bucky,” Steve sighs, wanting to reach out, but not daring to.

“I broke your laptop.” Bucky rubs at a purple blot on the couch, anger draining into the furnishings, seeking lower ground.

“I'll get a new one. Or not, this whole apartment is a computer if we want it to be.”

Bucky's head lolls limply onto the back of sofa. “How come I feel so out of time when I can barely remember being any place else?”

Steve licks his lips. “I bought you lipstick and nail polish for your sixteenth birthday,” He says wistfully,  instead of answering. “You used to come to my apartment almost every day to wear it. Usually you'd get there before I did, and you'd put it on and laze about in it until you had to go home. You used to kiss it all over things.”

Steve for one thing. Steve, all angles, even in places there shouldn't be any, drinking a teaspoon of condensed raw liver every morning with great red splotches on his neck and face. No love bites, just kisses. Turning up to school having missed a spot.

_Find y'self a blind chick did ya Rogers?_

“What about later? When I grew up?” Bucky watches Steve's face curiously as he flounders in the memories that Bucky's long since lost.

“You didn't do it so much. Only sometimes, and then it was like it was special.” The memory feels very recent in his mind and there must be more guilt attached than he'd previously realised because it's becoming difficult to breathe. “You used to date a lot of girls and then you'd kiss the lipstick off'a them instead.”

“Did I say what I was back then?” There's a note of hope in Bucky's voice that Steve feels responsible for cultivating.

“No. I only asked you once, and you said you didn't know.”

“Oh...” Bucky sounds disappointed, and the rawness of it is jarring. Bucky had done midnight heart to hearts and feelings during arguments, but never would've allowed such naked emotion to see the light of day. The Bucky who's left swallows loudly. “...Can't I just have the lipstick?”

“Of course you can.” It sticks in Steve's chest. They never had talked about this in the old days, and it occurs to him that maybe they never really will. It wasn't made to be spoken about, not by them. They didn't need to. He's been told at one of his own psychiatric evaluations that he was "a legacy of the days when the advice for treating trauma was silence and secrecy," and though it had offended him at the time, he can't seem to break through it. It did too much to them, changed too much. “We... We can buy anything you like online.”

“Or we could go to the mall,” Natasha says from behind them. Bucky twitches in surprise, but doesn't lunge over the back of the couch to attack her, an improvement on what might've happened a month ago.

“Ankle bracelet,” Bucky tells her, lifting the leg over the back of the couch in an acrobatic feat that the original Bucky would've struggled with on the most flexible of days.

“What about it? You two know I'm a spy, right? You think I can't deal with that?” Natasha thumbs at her phone ignoring Steve's glare. He's had enough of being made to feel inadequate with technology, and he's willing to bet that you don't have to be born in 1918 to find Tony's security system out of your league.

“They'll know if I take it off,” Bucky insists. Steve supposes all the hacking and escaping was handled by other members of HYDRA.

“Are you hacking into _JARVIS?_ ” Steve wants to know, because from what he knows of Tony, that is definitely not allowed.

Natasha raises a brown eyebrow at him but continues typing. “Nope. I'm just changing the software that receives the broadcast data from the bracelet so that it reads everything as “Subject in range.””

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also, quite appropriately, you can totally follow me on my Cap tumblr at non-binary-bucky.tumblr.com


	4. Cherry

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey there! Sorry it took me so long to update, I've just moved, started uni and I've also been near-constantly ill, so this has been a bit neglected.  
> Thank everyone for being so patient and sticking around, hope you like it :)  
> Thought we could have a night, psychiatrist free chapter for once.

Out in the sunshine for the first time in months, Bucky's increasingly healthful glow turns out to have been supported only by artificial lighting, and the golden tan lent by shadow and scruff gives way to a pallor that reminds Steve of his mother's clammy, sallow skin and gaunt features in the final months of her life.

Too long cooped up hasn't done Bucky any favours. Bucky looks around in sweeping arcs as though seeing Manhattan for the first time, which could well be the case. It's so different from how it was in 1943 that even Steve has no idea where anything is, and their arrival had been in the half-dark in an armoured truck.

But Natasha drives them out of town in a glossy black Mercedes with tinted windows which looks like it's never been driven in, pilfered from the parking level in the basement. Steve sits in the back because it feels wrong to drive Bucky around like a child, and immediately begins to feel nauseous from the smoothness of the ride.

Natasha attempts a few times to start a conversation, but when neither Steve nor Bucky tow the line, she gives up, and the thrum of an expensive engine is the only soundtrack to the journey.

She drives them out, all the way past White Plains and Bedford Hills, and stop outside of a small, half empty mall with potholes the size of small children filling its ugly parking lot.

“Why did we come so far out?” Bucky asks, climbing gracefully from the car as Steve stumbles and trips in his haste to escape the back seat on his jellied legs. Cars with six-figure suspension systems are not his preferred mode of transport.

“A bit of anonymity is always nice when you've just been exposed in international news coverage,” Natasha shrugs. Her hair still looks faintly ginger when lit by the sun from behind.

Steve just groans, car sick.

“And you're sure I can try things on?” Bucky stares up at the mall's shabby exterior, watching the few people milling around the entrance with trepidation.

A small part of Steve that doesn't want to throw up suddenly swells in jealous resentment: This had been a part of Bucky that was completely and entirely his, _he_ , Steve had been the one to get these things for Bucky in the past, and he had been Bucky's only audience whilst wearing them. Bucky had never bought a lipstick, never paid for nail polish, never even got to choose the colour beyond what was easiest to steal from an aunt or what got thrown out by the more wasteful folks on the rich side of town. And right now, when there's so little of Bucky to go around that Steve doesn't feel much like sharing it, not with Natasha and certainly not with a mall full of strangers. For a moment he almost entertains the idea that others will reject Bucky visibly enough to make going out in public infeasible, so that Steve can be there to protect and shelter and own that side of Bucky again.

He shakes the thought off guiltily. Just because a part of Bucky was in his care didn't mean he had any claim of ownership, then or now. The knowledge is not comforting.

“It'll be fine,” Natasha confirms. Steve shoots her a worried look, and she twitches back the corner of her jacket to reveal a holstered gun. It's certainly one way to make sure no one makes unnecessary comments.

Along the outside of the mall is a unisex hair salon sandwiched between a key cutter and a store selling cheap electronics. Bucky stops and stares at it until it becomes clear that Steve and Natasha aren't going to say anything, and then goes nervously to the door.

“Hey!” Says a flamboyant man in a black shirt and pants who springs out of nowhere to greet them as it opens. Bucky springs back, bumping into Steve's chest. The man's hair is weird and modern, all shaved and long and layered, and his wrists glitter with bracelets and his hands are perfectly manicured, drawing Bucky's eyes instantly. “Do you have an appointment?”

Bucky stares at him, lost for words. “Uh...”

“No,” Steve feels compelled to end the uncomfortable pause. “But if you have one free, my friend would like to get a cut.”

“Okay, well I have no appointments for the next hour and a half, so I could cut your hair now unless you'd prefer someone else do it,” The man tells them, which is redundant since none of them have any concept of the relative skill of the man and his colleagues.

Bucky looks to Steve and Natasha, and then back at the man who is now holding a hairdressing gown. “O...Kay.”

“Okay!” The man's enthusiasm makes Bucky jump again. “Let's sit you down over here and we can get started.”

Bucky is still staring at the hairdresser wide eyed, and sits down without resistance. Steve has a brief moment of panic at idea of anyone holding a pair of scissors near Bucky's face, but the time to object has clearly passed.

“How do you want it to look?” The hairdresser asks, putting voice to Steve's other fear.

“The usual,” Bucky replies, almost casually, settling into the chair as though in the same barbershop they used to go into as often as they could afford it when they'd lived together before the war.

“You're sure?” Steve asks, surprised.

Bucky gives him a look that says, _I've been sure since 1934, what's your problem now?_ So clearly that Natasha says, “Leave it, Rogers.”

“Well, no offence, darling, but I'm not your usual hair stylist, so you're going to have to tell me what you usually get done to your hair,” The self-confessed stylist tuts, running his hands through Bucky's long, messy hair, trying to find layering where there is none.

Bucky blinks several times at being called darling, and then recites, “Short back, medium sides, long on top,” words practised bimonthly from the day Bucky was old enough to refuse Mrs Barnes' enhanced bowl cuts. Then Bucky looks suspiciously up at the flopping fringe of the stylist and hastily amends, “But not so long as that.”

Steve watches awkwardly from a few feet away while Natasha kicks back in an armchair. “Relax, Steve. Barnes knows what Barnes wants.” Then, as though to console herself. “It'll grow back in a few months anyway, right?”

Dark hair falls to the ground in loose curls, dozens of them, before the clippers come out and begin to buzz away short tufts from the back and sides of Bucky's head. Bucky twitches in the chair, eyes fixed on the razor, but doesn't move.

It only takes thirty minutes (and a heart-stopping $27 for Steve before he remembers inflation), before Bucky emerges from the salon looking remarkably well turned out.

“It looks great, Bucky,” Natasha drawls slightly, forcing out a compliment against her nature.

Bucky gives her half of a small, tight smile.

“How do you feel?” Steve asks, having to restrain himself from reaching out to touch the short hair at the back of Bucky's neck. His heart is jumping a little, squeezing in his chest as the sight of Bucky looking so much like Bucky. _  
_

“...Gunked up,” Bucky tells him, dragging fingers through the gel filled spikes that will no doubt be washed and combed back later, maybe slicked with some brylcreem if they remember to buy it in.

“Yeah, that's pretty unavoidable these days,” Steve says, although he personally has given in to modern styling gel, and is wearing some right now of his own volition.

  


Inside the mall is a huge department store with a whole half a floor dedicated to cosmetics, all sold from little counters like some bizarre, ultra clean indoor market.

Steve and Bucky take it in with bulging eyes, overwhelmed by the opulence hidden in such a deceptively shabby looking building. Steve's been in a twenty-first century mall before, but somehow it's not all the technology that throws him into culture shock each time, it's the excessive wealth.

Bucky drifts between the counters for a while, unable to approach any, until Natasha gets bored and takes matters into her own hands. She approaches a woman behind a display containing more different kinds of make-up than Steve knew existed, and more shades of red, pink, and brown than the biggest art supply store could ever hope to match.

“Hi, can I help you?” The woman at the counter asks. Her badge proclaims her to be called Trisha with a great deal more enthusiasm than she actually shows.

“Actually, you can help this one,” Natasha gestures at Bucky, who twitches with anxiety and looks ready to bolt.

The woman's eyes widen in surprise and for a period just short of outright rudeness, she stares at Bucky, but whatever she might think, she's clearly not willing to turn anyone away when they're accompanied by someone with Natasha's forceful smile and a guy who looks remarkably like Captain America.

She talks up an anxious drone of presumably relevant conversation as Bucky pours over the endless colours, ignoring her as best as possible but still getting twitchier by the second.

Then, in a misguided attempt to appear more welcoming than she feels, she tries to get Bucky to sit on a stool, a reddish brown gripped lightly between her fingertips. But Bucky immediately points to a particular shade on the counter beside the mirror. “Ya know, I... I don't really need all this. I want that one...” Bucky's voice trails into silence, unused to being listened to.

Trisha looks surprised again, and smiles tightly in disagreement. “The cherry's very bright and, I would say, childish. A darker colour would look more mature on you, maybe a brown.”

Bucky sits through her idle chatter, head nodding at appropriate moments, but ducks out of the way as she tries again, this time with a brownish pink that Steve can't differentiate from Bucky's lips _without_ make-up. Anger buzzes under his skin as she rebuffs Bucky's attempts to ask for the red a second time. “Thanks, we'll take it.”

“You'll take the brown?” Trisha assumes hopefully.

Steve can't help but glare at her even as he takes in Bucky's face, frustrated at Trisha and confused by the interruption. “The immature cherry, please.”

“But--”

“Thanks, here's your money,” Natasha interjects before Trisha can say anything else, holding out a bill that Steve is entirely certain she's just lifted from his person.

“Eighteen dollars?” Bucky can't help but exclaim loudly as the embarrassed make-up artist hands Natasha Steve's change. The increasingly tense atmosphere seems to have passed Bucky by, or perhaps has already been forgotten. “Steve, you remember when it was twenty five cents?”

“Do you?” Steve asks as they walk away, ambling in the vague direction of another counter, trying to steer Bucky clear of their small audience of gaping shoppers.

“Oh...” Bucky blushes, ashamed to admit, “No. But... I'm sure it was, once. I mean... I looked it up, on the internet, I tried to find the kind I liked and I couldn't remember what it was but I saw a load of pictures and a lot of them were twenty five cents, some even less...” Bucky trails off again into a barely-spoken anecdote about an internet search and Steve feels compelled to at least look like he's listening until Bucky's done talking, even if he can't hear it.

“Well, you're not wrong there, Buck, they did used to be cheaper. You used to have the Cutex brand, but they don't make those anymore. Still, I reckon a place as big as this can out-do the convenience store I used to work in.” Steve turns round to flash a grin, but Bucky is gone, standing at another display, the half-memories of affordable goods seemingly forgotten.

They don't try and consult a stylist again, but Bucky doesn't need one. Assured that money is no object, Bucky is happy to buy some of nearly everything to try it all out on ever more sparse patches of bare skin.

By the time the after-work rush is beginning to fill the mall, they’ve bought eyeliner in three colours and another half dozen of lipsticks, some in shades so similar that Steve would not have been able to distinguish them before the serum, eye shadows, foundations, blushers and nail polish in an endless array of colours and shades.

Only once does Bucky seem to come back to the realisation that the twenty first century is abominably expensive – wants to know if Steve is sure they can definitely afford two nail polishes for $20. “Is there going to be enough left for rent?”

“We don't pay rent,” Steve repeats. “And even if we did, your back pay could probably buy this mall and everything in it.”

They wander around for a little longer, but it's hitting 6pm and people are streaming in through the doors thick and fast.

“What about clothes?” Steve asks. “Do you want any… Skirts or anything?”

Bucky considers it, gaze sweeping over the busying mall uncomfortably. “I… No, no…”

“Okay,” Steve says. People are watching them now, staring at Bucky’s face heavily made up with a patchwork of different make-up on every available inch of skin with obvious interest, and occasionally, disapproval. “We can get them some other time, if you change your mind. Somewhere with less people.”

Bucky’s chest heaves in panic, eyes bulging slightly, lips moving in a half-whispered monologue that's entirely drowned out by the babble of those around them.

“You're okay, Bucky,” Natasha tries to be reassuring, but there's a degree of urgency in her voice that isn't exactly relaxing. “They’re just looking at you because you’re so pretty.”

Bucky looks unconvinced and hurries them towards the exit, twitching and ducking into stores to avoid large groups of people.

By the time they reach the car, Bucky seems to be having some kind of meltdown, trembling and hyperventilating, but has accrued enough make-up to conceal almost anything.

“I’m – I'm - it's allowed, why are they watching me?” Bucky asks as they bundle the shopping into the trunk as quickly as they can, trying to slide in the odd shaped boxes next to each other. Like Tetris, Steve thinks.

“It's okay, Buck.” He isn't sure why Bucky needed new _“_ men's _”_ shoes, or a special machine to apply gel nail polish, or why, after spending twenty minutes lurking anxiously outside of Victoria's Secret, Bucky decided to soothe the nerves by having Steve buy something called a jewellery tree, even though between them they have a locket from Steve's mother, a watch that had belonged to Bucky's father and had been sent to Steve by someone who had noticed the engraving at a thrift store, and two sets of spare dog tags. He tries not to be too affected by the near terror on Bucky’s face. “You don’t need their permission, remember?”

Bucky nods almost violently, looking no less disturbed for the reminder, and opens the car door with so much force that the vehicle lurches to the right, groaning under the stress and its excess contents.

Bucky remains jittery and alert throughout most of the return journey, and Steve can see it putting Natasha's teeth on edge.

They hit traffic coming the other way out of Manhattan and have to slow down because of an accident on Broadway Bridge, and Steve tries to distract Bucky by dragging what make-up he can out of the tightly packed trunk and suggesting that now might be the time to try some of it out.

Bucky does, scrubbing off the layers upon layers of foundation and eye shadow with a wipe that goes the colour of skin with bruises of browns and blues across it, and then pencilling in the highly arched eyebrows, going over eye lids with kohl and eventually settling on a lipstick that would've pleased Trisha far more than the cherry red.

In spite of the bizarrely styled hair, Steve's stomach does a flip of recognition as they step out of the car in the basement of the Tower.

“No note, car gone!” Someone says behind them in Stark's usual melodramatic tone, as Natasha lifts the hood on the trunk. “You could have died! You could have _been seen!”_

“He is quoting a movie I watched recently,” Bucky tells Natasha anxiously as Tony swaggers up to them looking exasperated.

“You're breaking the law, you, Cap, are breaking _American law._ That's theft, right there. And breaking a confinement order, and, arguably, I would say, kidnap.” He crosses his arms tightly and glares, trying to lean around Steve to get a glance of Bucky.

Natasha shoves a large bag onto his chest. “Then you'd better get us inside quick before you become an accessory, since we all know you are the _perfect_ law abiding citizen.”

Bucky pulls Steve by the back of his shirt towards the trunk, as though their day's haul might be about to be sequestered by police as Tony begins to say that he doesn't like being handed things.

“ _That_ wasn't allowed,” Bucky murmurs with a note of fear.

“It's fine.” But Steve can't bear to see such alien uncertainty in such a familiar face, and he looks away, taking bags and handing them to Bucky. His brain stops and starts at the idea of a frightened Bucky in a world of absolute rules and punishment. “Stark doesn't care, he's just making a fuss because he likes to be the centre of attention. I used to break the law all the time,” Steve says, as though Bucky might find this impressive.

Bucky fumbles with the bags, the crinkling plastic mostly drowning out the _“now that is unfair,”_ in the background, and makes no comments on Steve's past life of crime.

Steve takes Bucky into the elevator with as much as they can carry, leaving Natasha to intimidate Tony into submission.

“Let's get ready for bed,” He says, although it's barely 9:30. He feels exhausted, right down to his bones.

“Okay,” Bucky says, and then stops in the bedroom door way off the main living room. “It's not very clean in here.”

“We can sort that in the morning,” Steve promises, although he's sure that even if Bucky agrees now, he probably won't be allowed in when tomorrow morning comes around.

When he comes out of his own room, Natasha has somehow let herself in, having managed to get all of the rest of their shopping into the elevator on her own.

Steve blushes at his own laziness, and even more when he realises that Natasha is dressed, perhaps literally, to kill, whilst he is in pyjamas with alternating cats and dogs on them. “Thank you,” He says, throat a little tight.

“That's alright,” Natasha replies, trying to look as though she removes electronic bracelets from super-soldiers and then drives them two hours out of town to a back-end mall for a shopping spree on a regular basis. “That's what friends are for.”

She looks away from him, and Steve follows her gaze to where Bucky is standing in plain pyjamas, still made up in that way that instantly makes the hair stand up on the back of Steve's neck.

Somehow, Bucky has managed to tame the spiked hair in the last ten minutes, wet it and slicked it back with a comb.

Steve stares, trying to block out the modern apartment and the metal fingers glinting at Bucky's side, until he can almost see it, Bucky standing there just inside their old-new apartment, nineteen and made up so modestly that so long as they got out of their corner of town quick enough, people might think it was all natural good looks. Maybe off for the night without Steve, to dance with some girl, or to go to one of the shadier bars in their own part of town, to be the girl who came home at three in the morning smelling of some guy's cigarette smoke, some guy's perfume, or maybe just dressing up for dressing up's sake.

The old charm is there, too, and pyjamas or no, Bucky slips across the hallway to Natasha and plants a kiss on her cheek that Steve certainly would not have dared attempt. There's no stinging slap though, only Natasha's subversive grin, and a faint but perfectly formed imprint of Bucky's lips on her cheek.

“Thanks,” Is all Bucky says, before the door to the dark, stale bedroom shuts with a clunk, leaving Steve feeling strangely hollow, as though Bucky took his insides into the room and left Steve locked outdoors.

It must show on his face, because Natasha's grin falters into something more serious. “No need to look so glum, Rogers. Just... Things take time, you know? It isn't easy, taking yourself back from them.”

“Yeah,” He says, and he knows, but it doesn't seem to make it any easier. “Thanks, Natasha,” He repeats, before realising he's quoting what Bucky has just said, and then, “Do you want a drink?”

“No,” She raises a sceptical eyebrow at him. “You're already wearing your kitten jammies, I'd hate to keep you up any longer.”

“Okay.”

“G'night, Steve.” Natasha smiles at him again, piling their shopping up against one wall, and steps back out of the door towards the elevator.

“Night,” he says weakly, staring at the mark of Bucky's kiss as she disappears.

He goes to bed, but can't regain the feeling of progress he'd had on the journey back. Instead, he fixates on why he'd bought Bucky lipstick that very first time, on what he'd wanted, needed. Some tangible proof that he still had some kind of rock, that somebody was still there to love him, that he wasn't on his own for the first time in his life. He'd been so desperate to get that back, ever since he'd woken up in this strange new world, and the need had only gotten stronger since he'd first glimpsed that face from the past all those months ago.

His tears are bitter and selfish, and he can't stop them, so he cries quietly into his pillow until he falls asleep.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm toying with the idea of the last chapter being from Bucky's POV, since we barely know what Bucky is thinking and doing throughout all this. How would people feel about the change of perspective?

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is going to be 3-4 chapters long but it might take me a while to update it as I'm in the middle of a bunch of exams. D:  
> Let me know if you like it so far!


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